alexei daine | district seven

Everything is shit.

Alexei Daine can't remember the last time that everything wasn't complete shit, actually. Maybe Artemiy and Andriy's twentieth birthday, she would've been seven then. That big pavilion in the park down by the river, early October with the acorns drumming like hail against the strandboard roof every time a gust of wind shook the weary oak trees. She wouldn't have noticed them at all if her uncle hadn't pulled her aside and told her to listen for them. She'd thought he was going to scold her for the raspberries she'd filched — plucked right out of the frosting on the cake, their ghosts tinged pink in the meringue left behind — but instead he grinned and told her to hear it over the din of cousin Pyotr's out-of-rhythym accordion, accompanied by Sergei and Lyudmilla drunkenly warbling, accompanied by five-year-old Natalya perched on Maxim's shoulders trying to smack their father on the head with the tambourine that someone had the bad sense to hand her.

She wishes she could remember exactly what her uncle had said. Something about a feast for the squirrels and the rats. That was the last time she'd seen him.

That was the last time they'd had cake.

That was the last time Pyotr played his accordion, the thirty or forty of them — aunts, uncles, cousins, all eleven of her brothers and sisters and siblings — dancing and laughing and jesting and carrying on.

That was the last time Irina drank her twin under the table, even though neither of them ought to have been drinking at all.

That was the last time she heard their mother sing.

That was the last time Alexei felt like she was actually getting away with something when she was getting away with something.

The war came later, or maybe it had already taken root by that point and was just breaking the surface.

It's a boring story. Half of Panem could probably tell it exactly the same way.

Her oldest siblings left first: Artemiy took a hammer, a saw, and a chisel from their mother's workshop, and was conscripted as a combat engineer in the next caravan bound for the frontlines. Her last letter arrived from somewhere near District Two. Missing, presumed dead.

Andriy, ever his twin's opposite, took nothing but Maxim and Sergei, and offered their collective skills in combat reverse-engineering and went to, quote, blow some bullshit up, in the other direction. Killed in action — the three of them — in a skirmish on the rail tracks near District Eleven.

Their father dropped dead of a heart attack.

The other sisters left one after another, as they grew old enough to fight or the rebellion grew old enough to take them, or some combination thereof. Some news made it back —

Their mother grieved down the barrel of a rifle.

— and by the end of the war, it was just three of them: Natalya, too young to remember anything but the ruined world that they lived in; Alexei, too young to be anything but headstrong; Kseniya, too young to be the de-facto parent that she had to be anyway.

What was she supposed to do?

Pretend that nothing was wrong?

Pretend that half the district wasn't in splinters around them?

Pretend that they were coming home? All of them? Any of them? Nobody named Daine left District Seven and then came back to it.

Was she supposed to pretend like it was okay that their mother had left them to go play soldier, too? Pretend like they were doing alright here on their own? Pretend like Kseniya wasn't constantly at the end of her wits trying to keep food on the table and Alexei from doing something stupid and Nataliya from adopting this week's wounded solider with no regard to ideology or sides or danger?

Had they been pretending their whole lives? Is everyone? Each district soldier? Is Artemiy, Andriy, Maxim, Sergei? Or Lyudmilla or Katya? Irina, Zoya, Yevgeniya? Their mother? Kseniya, each time she told herself it's just for a day, a week, a month? Alexei, every time she told herself she could do this or she could help?

Pretend that this is fine just because it's normal?

It's her fault, probably, for all of those years of jealousy. Her whole family had done their part for the war effort. Had bled for the cause. Had died for it. And what did Alexei do? What could Alexei do?

Their mother's workshop had long since been picked clean of anything sharp or functional. She took to prying the nails out of the floorboards and bending them into little starburst pyramids, makeshift caltrops for... she never knew. She thought there'd be a truck or a column of whitecoats storming the district, but even with the world burning all around them, the action never quite made it to Alexei. They're still scattered across the top of her desk, jagged jacks waiting to be played with.

She just wanted to help. To do something useful. No one wanted her — not even toward the end of it all, when they'd send anyone with a pulse down to the front lines with a sharpened stick. Hell, the way Kseniya described it, a pulse was optional.

Ghost soldiers, dummy armies, corpses propped up to bolster their numbers from a distance — macabre, but all-too-easy to believe. Some nights, Alexei awoke in a cold sweat with Artemiy's blank eyes still staring at her from across the forest. Some nights, Alexei could only will herself to sleep imagining Andriy still standing guard, inimitable shithead smirk still comforting in death.

It is her fault, and Alexei knows it must be true because of the number of times her sister insists that it isn't. The way that she told Alexei that it wasn't before Alexei even said that it was.

It doesn't really matter if it is or if it isn't, not when the net effect of self-pity and self-loathing are practically indistinguishable. Besides, she'd rather hate herself a little bit at all times than spend the rest of her life wallowing. Anger is a motor. Sorrow is a brick.

Some days are better than others, but three years on, there's still always that low-grade loathing humming in the back of her mind. She's glad she doesn't remember any better, whole weeks wiped from her memory by shock. Or maybe by the concussion.

What she does remember is:

- The timber line. The little locomotive still carried bulkhead flatcars stacked high with cheap pines to the sawmill under the cover of darkness. She liked to watch from behind the stacks.

- The droning hum of the hovercrafts. The hair on the back of her neck stands on end whenever she recalls it, even now.

- Shouts. Explosions. The world rolling out from under her feet.

- Lying in the dirt, eyes skyward, alone. Pinned under what felt like the whole forest. Fucking pine.

- Nothing.

- Nothing.

- Nothing.

- The last bottle of maple syrup — one she didn't even realize they still had — out on the table. Moving to pour some on the watery bowl of oatmeal in front of her, trying to remove the cap with an arm she didn't even realize she was missing.

- Nothing.